Stay on target

You know Daleks and Davros and Missy the Master, Angels and Silence hell-bent on disaster. But do you recall the most underrated Doctor Who villains of all?

Each week, I will dig into the depths of the Whoniverse to examine one rejected, misjudged, or altogether forgotten big bad. You might want to read this with the light on.

Creep factor turned up to 11 (via BBC)

PEG DOLLS

First appearance: “Night Terrors” (2011)—season 6, episode 9

Home planet: N/A

Doctor: Eleventh

Companions: Amy Pond, Rory Williams

The scariest place in the universe is not a child’s bedroom—it’s a child’s imagination.

Er … a Tenza’s imagination.

Little George is frightened of almost everything. He blinks too much when he’s panicked, stares off into space a lot, and never cries. An odd kid, for sure.

George (Jamie Oram) hides every petrifying thought—the sound of the elevator, the witchy old neighbor—locked in his wardrobe. That’s not enough, though, to soothe this eight-year-old’s anxieties.

Answering the boy’s distress call (“Please save me from the monsters”), the Doctor, Amy, and Rory arrive in modern-day England, where George is desperate for help.

“Whatever’s inside that cupboard is so terrible, so powerful, that it amplified the fears of an ordinary little boy across all the barriers of time and space,” the Doctor tells George’s father, Alex (Daniel Mays). “You see these eyes? They’re old eyes. And one thing I can tell you … Monsters are real.”

But is George?

George faces his fears (via BBC)

While the titular Time Lord tries to save a wee boy from terror, companions Amy and Rory are in a living nightmare of their own.

After plummeting to what one would only assume was their death in a falling elevator, the pair wake up on the floor of a dark house. When the intrepid explorers hear sinister giggling in a nearby closet, they find a life-sized wooden doll—nothing to be afraid of, right?

Wrong.

More than just macabre figures lurking in the dark, the toys are living, breathing people transformed into caroling peg dolls with unsettlingly large heads full of knotted yarn hair.

Landlord Jim Purcell (Andy Tiernan) is their first victim, mutated before Rory and Amy’s eyes from beefy man to timbered plaything. Even Amy Pond can’t outrun the puppets, who convert the leggy ginger into a hat-wearing dolly whose only objective is to find new playmates.

AMY: Was I?RORY: Yeah.(via BBC)

The Doctor, meanwhile, finally completes the puzzle: George is not human. He’s a Tenza—an alien with subconscious psychic powers, using a perception filter to alter the memories of his surrogate Earth parents, Alex and Claire.

When George overhears the adults discussing professional help for their “funny kid,” he expects to be sent away—a true fear that sets off his psychic defenses, and brings his imagined phobias to life.

It’s only when Alex expresses unconditional love for his son that George can overcome his fears, expelling the peg dolls from the house and reverting the toys (and the people they possessed) to their original form.

Originally pitched as a children’s science fiction show, the Doctor Who reboot often crosses into very dark territory. And “Night Terrors,” written by Mark Gatiss, is no exception.

Let’s be honest: I’m 31 years old, and still flinch at unexpected noises in the darkness of my home.

And, just in case the world isn’t already scary enough, here are instructions for making your own peg doll mask.

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